You know that the gospels were written with the understanding of the resurrection. So maybe you can look at one incident in the life of Christ you can kind of grasp this.

In the Old Testament they celebrated the fact that God provided water in the desert when Moses struck the rock and water came out. So there was a festival, feast day. They would carry the water from Shiloh and march around and pray and thank the Lord, etc. In the midst of that feast Jesus stood up and said: "All you who are thirsty come to me and drink." You believe that Scripture says that out from within him rivers of flowing water come out.

Then John shows us in Chapter 7 the reaction to that proclamation of Jesus. Some people seem to believe and some basically said, "he must be he must be the Messiah", yet others the Prophet promised by Moses in Deuteronomy. And others said, "How can this be? Can the Messiah come from Galilee?" And others were amazed saying things like "but no man has ever spoken as this man!" Then of course the Pharisees were kind of adamant, they ridiculed people who believed in Jesus and basically said, "If you believe in Jesus you’re cursed!" They were kind of arrogant.

So Jesus heard all this. He listened to the voices and as he hearing these different things and looking at people, I’m sure and even Nicodemus was there at least it seems to be as John presents this in Chapter 7. I wonder if he remembered what happened to him when he was brought into the temple when the Blessed Mother told him how Simeon said that he would be the occasion for the rise and fall of many in Israel and that he would be a sign of contradiction. Because it was unfolding right then and there in front of him. Yet no matter how many people doubted him or didn’t doubt him, people believed who didn’t believe, people who attacked him didn’t attack him. It didn’t make any difference. Jesus stood in their midst as their Savior. Or as he put it he was their life and their light. He was independent of how they would react and how they would stand toward him.

So in a certain sense this is the way the church is today. The Church stands in the world and the world mocks our faith. It mocks it in many ways. It puts down our values, it makes us try to look stupid for what we believe, especially attacks of purity. It bashes Catholicism and it comes from all kind of sources. It comes from T.V., from magazines, from books, from ex-Catholics who are angry at the church; it comes from hostile Fundamentalists who think that all Catholics are going to hell. This is the situation. And yet the Church stands here. But the church is also you and me that is the Mystical Body that includes you and me. And Jesus is not outside us, he’s in us by our Baptism.

Jesus is our strength, he’s the source of our faith, and he’s our life. We should be able to say with St. Paul that we too are certain that neither life nor death, either height nor breadth, or nothing, even no creature can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. We, too, participate in this then in this constant resurrected presence of Jesus.